Mirchi

Spot the difference in Mirchi Top 10

Mirchi: The movie opens with a love story in Italy and the smoke trail leads you to Palanadu in AP.

2. Darling: Hero gets a musical introduction as the member of a band.

The decline of story telling only intensified as years in our industry passed. A medium with potential to connect at a personal level even when in the midst of hundreds had been reduced to a marketing scheme spun around a star's image. Our films have tried harder and harder to make the spectacles we clearly cannot afford the highpoints of the story. How many times can we be awed when the hero breaks his character of a hibernating cheetah and kills countless people just before the interval? The compulsion of an interval does make it tough on the writing to create two highpoints, but repeating the plot lines and all the details that come with it is just irresponsible behavior.

Jai (Prabhas) arrives at a green screen neighborhood (supposed to be Milan) and starts playing his keytar without even the courtesy of joining the rest of the band at the podium. It is the hero's entrance and hence the camera stays on him and he doesn't even bother to get to the podium. All this might seem insignificant in the larger scheme of things because Jai never plays his keytar again and it adds nothing to his character. But, this is precisely the attitude that made our films the gaudy low-life marketing strategies.

Manasa (Richa Gangopadhyaya) runs into Jai while trying to get away from a multi ethnic group that obviously has one guy who speaks Telugu. Jai doesn't even fight them, just tells them what he CAN do, smashes a car and tells them to love all. This omnipresent group that wants to rape triggers the Jai-Manasa love story. After spending a weekend with Jai on a beach Manasa wishes if life can be this wonderful all the time and her skepticism about it is justified because she has a family back in Andhra that owns a huge bungalow, a paralyzed character, suppressed wives and people who live for revenge. The idea of two villages locked in rivalry is so familiar that the film doesn't even bother to give reasons for it.

However, Jai makes it back to India before Manasa and schemes a way to get into her home by tricking Poorna (Subba Raju), one of her relatives. And soon enough he is changing lives by making speeches that has as many as 3 reaction shots from every actor and lightens up the bungalow's mood with his urban charm (pff! urban).

The killer in Jai is revealed at the half way mark when he saves The Deva family from an attack planned by one of Manasa's uncles. The bang - he saved his own family, he is the rival's (Deva) son.

As unsurprising as that twist felt at the time, the second half further slumped into the pit of clich\xe9s with the story of Deva (Satyaraj) and his aspiration to bring peace to the region. Anushka (Jai's cousin) fills in for the second half romance as per the market requirement. The film kept both its female leads alive and Jai gets to do only one of them; unlike the practice of gifting both the girls to the hero as task completion trophies.

The end of it...Jai achieves by loving the enemy what his dad couldn't through non-action for the past 20 years.

The film's got a decent visual standard, occasional humor and a decent set of tracks. But, on the whole it doesn't sell because of the many lazy liberties it had taken.

Talking of lazy liberties, Prabhas appeared physically inconsistent and irrespective of what he looked like, the performance has a forced sense to it wherein what he tries to express seems to stop within himself and we never get to see it, like most times. Satyaraj was almost making an impact, but the masala gloss of the circumstances depicted has little room to operate in.

The scheme gets overly lost in its belief of commercial entertainment and never manages an honest moment.

All that Mirchi qualifies to be called is a clich\xe9d rehash of Telugu films such as “Indra”, “Brindavanam”, “Shankam” and Ready” among many more. What could've been a neat family entertainer, is jeopardized by a plot that's been done to death over the years. To top it all, there's so much of violence in the film that you'd curse yourself had you walked in to theatre with your little ones. While most part of the film can be suitably placed under the family genre, the rest of it leaks of blood and killing.

So, what's this film all about? “Mirchi” is about a protagonist called Jai, played by Prabhas, with a sole intention of spreading love and transforming with it. His ideology is simple - love someone if you can because you might be loved back or not, but you have nothing to lose.

With the above philosophy, Jai falls in love with Manasa, played by Richa, who loves him as much as he loves her, but wouldn't accept him because of her past. She hails from a family that longs to see its rival family dead if given an opportunity. Having learnt about her past, Jai, on a mission to transform every member of the family with love, travels to India.

At this juncture, we're revealed that Jai, too, has a violent past which he's been hiding within all these. Who is Jai, and why does he a past filled gore? Will he succeed in transforming every family member of Manasa with love? This forms the rest of the story.

The film barely has anything new besides the fact that we get to see Prabhas in a role sans mass appeal for at least good 30-45 minutes into the film. It's towards the end of the first half, we're introduced the violent side, which takes us into the past of Jai. While the first half of the film is entertaining, the second half is filled with violence, melodramatic dialogues and some expressionless scenes involving Sathyaraj and Prabhas.

This is not the first time we're dealing with such a story. Writer-director Koratala Siva doesn't even take any effort to make changes to a story that's been milked dry over the years. All that he does is commercialize the story from a perspective of delivering a commercial family entertainer.

Prabhas does a decent job of holding the film together. His effort to mouth a few English lines is irritating, especially when he can't pronounce the word 'dude' properly. He pronounces it with a weird accent - 'Duuudee'. There was no time spent in developing his character. We don't know if he's either a musician or an architect.

Other actors don't shine in their respective role but give a satisfying performance. Devi's music is passable and only attracts the masses. Cinematography by Madhi is slick and very cutting-edge.